Jonathan Kay: Three reasons why a McGuinty run for the federal Liberals would end in disaster

Why a McGuinty run for the federal Liberals would end in disaster

No Canadian provincial premier has gone on to become prime minister since the 19th century. Some are saying that outgoing Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty could be the man to break that trend. But they’re wasting their breath — for three reasons:

The Canadian obsession with region arguably has made it more difficult for former Canadian prermiers to become PM — not less — since the days of Sir John Thompson and Sir Charles Tupper;

Even if McGuinty could somehow overcome his regional identification, two very specific disgraces — Caledonia and the power-plant scandal — make him a toxic national candidate;

It’s all moot anyway, since no one seeking the Liberal leadership is going to beat Justin Trudeau, whose star power and Quebec connection make him (as I’ve argued before, and so won’t bother rehashing in this space) the right man for the job.

Let’s take the regional factor first. This obsession with geography is so deeply ingrained in the Canadian political consciousness that we sometimes forget how all-encompassing it has become. Every meeting of premiers is conducted as a contest of who gets what. Any discussion about EI, energy policy, language rights, supply management, Senate reform and equalization (most obviously) is interpreted in regional terms. And hissy fits instantly ensue if someone doesn’t get what they expect — the most embarrassing and juvenile example being then-Premier Danny Williams’ order to take the Canadian flag down from Newfoundland government buildings in 2004, because he didn’t like the latest sweetheart deal offered to him on offshore royalties. (There is no equivalent to this in U.S. politics — except in the more locally rooted practice of congressional earmarks. No one accuses Barack Obama of bankrupting Texas to rain cash on Hawaii. Nor is it suspected that Mitt Romney will raid Wall Street for the benefit of Massachusetts or Michigan.)

If McGuinty became federal Liberal leader, the idea of him becoming PM would be seen through this lens of obsessive regionalism: A guy who formerly was just one of 13 premiers and territorial leaders fighting over the spoils of the Canadian economy, suddenly would become the chairman of the board. Why would anyone West of Ontario vote for such a leader — especially when they’ve gotten used to their own guy in the chairman’s seat since 2006? It makes no sense.

Of course, there are a lot of seats in Ontario itself — and it is mathematically possible for the Liberals to win at least a minority government if they dominate McGuinty’s home province, and win a scattering of seats elsewhere in the country. But that won’t happen. Politicians get stale after a decade or so. Even when a leader delivers successive wins, party insiders start looking for renewal at the top, as was the case with Jean Chrétien in the early 2000s. Even if it were not for McGuinty’s two signature disgraces, discussed immediately below, McGuinty plainly has passed his best-before date among the voters who know him best.

I use the word “disgrace” because I think they go beyond mere “scandals.” The most recent of the two was McGuinty’s decision to cancel gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga — at a dead-loss cost of about a quarter billion dollars, and possibly much more — for no other reason than to gain advantage, during an election campaign, in two ridings that had become infected with NIMBYism. It was an insult to taxpayers. It was an insult to the government workers who’d run the tendering process. And it was an insult to democracy: No one, even in the government itself, could credibly argue that this was anything more than the McGuinty Liberals wasting massive amounts of cash for electoral advantage.

Oh yeah: And then they lied about it. This sound like a guy you want running post-Sponsorship scandal, post-Charbonneau Canada? I don’t want to get on a high horse here, but the gas-plant issue was what made me lose any respect I once had for McGuinty as a politician. It represented the absolute worst instincts of the political class.

Then there’s Caledonia, where McGuinty sold out a whole Ontario community out of cowardly — that is the word for it — fear that keeping the peace might result in bad headlines. This was not an instance of a government paralyzed in a brief moment of crisis. As chronicled in Christie Blatchford’s definitive book on the subject, the stand-off with natives went on for years. I have never seen a Canadian politician, or indeed any leader in any OECD nation, so utterly impotent in the face of a clear and ongoing threat to the state’s monopoly on the use of force.

Caledonia is forgotten by many Ontarians — especially in Toronto, a world away from native land disputes. But across the West, and even in Quebec, where people still remember the 1990 Oka Crisis, McGuinty’s pathetic Caledonia performance will resonate in attack ads. There are dozens of native activist bands across this country that would be only too happy to set up blockades or burn police cars as a means of pressing their demands, if they thought they could get away with it. With McGuinty as PM, they probably would. And in any federal election in which McGuinty ran the Liberals, voters would be reminded of that fact day in and day out.

Dalton McGuinty does have some accomplishments under his belt in the fields of education and health care — I will grant him that. He surrounded himself with smart wonks (I know some of them) who truly have implemented best practices in these two crucial policy areas. But in terms of the political character he revealed in office, McGuinty was a failure. On the national stage, never a friendly place for regional politicians even under the best of circumstances, he would be torn to pieces.